Parliament passes controversial NHI bill

The bill, which seeks to achieve universal health coverage for all South Africans, was first introduced to Parliament in 2019.

The bill will now be sent to the National Council of Provinces for concurrence.

All 200 ANC MPs voted in favour of the bill, while all DA's 71 MPs voted against the bill.

The EFF, IFP, Freedom Front Plus, ACDP, and ATM also voted against the bill but there were still not enough votes from the opposition to shoot it down. 

GOOD party, NFP, AIC and PAC were amongst the opposition parties that voted with the ANC in support of the bill.

The controversial bill has been opposed by various civil society organisations and policy institutes, including the South African Institute of Race Relations, which has continuously warned the government against the implementation of the bill.

But Health Minister Joe Phaahla defended the bill, saying it seeks to stop the health gap between public and private health services.

"What we have not been so successful over is the avoidance of replacement of race-based differentiation of access and quality by a class-based differentiation. As inequality has been growing in our country even cutting across race, access to quality health services has been a casualty with those who have private medical insurance consuming 51% of the national spending while constituting only 16% of the population, while 84% depend on 49% resources from the fiscus and services provided by public health system only.

"This has led to a situation where the public health system is under tremendous pressure while the private health care is over-servicing its clients leading to ever rising costs to the members of medical schemes while the investors are enjoying huge dividends including from the JSE," said Phaahla.

The minister acknowledged that a lot of work lies ahead to fix the public health care system.

"We accept that the NHI will not be the silver bullet that will fix all our health problems but it is the necessary foundation to build on for a progressive improvement of access with quality and equity. We must work together to build our own national health service.

"We must address the genuine fears of those who have access to private services where there are no queues, no waiting times, and no shortage of commodities except in a disaster like Covid-19 where even private hospitals ran out of beds and oxygen at some stage," added Phaahla.

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